The great philosopher Lily Tomlin once said “Humanity invented language out of a deep need to complain.” It’s sad that the most intelligent and adaptable species on the planet is also, by and large, the most miserable. We seem to be wired in a way that makes unhappiness a kind of default position. Our complex forebrain evolved as a tool for anticipating and overcoming dangers, for protecting us from pain, and for solving problems: so dangers, pain and problems are what it most easily notices. What’s pleasant and harmonious tends to slip into the background. The fact that we set aside a special day every year for thanksgiving underlines the fact that gratitude is, for many of us, a special rather than a common experience.

Can we do anything about this? According to the world’s spiritual traditions, we can. A tenet of traditional Buddhist psychology, for instance, is that we develop positive qualities such as compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, and gratitude, by inclining the mind in their direction through deliberately focusing on thoughts which express those values.

This principle has also long been recognized in the culture of Alcoholics Anonymous, where it’s common for sponsors to teach newcomers to relieve some of the negativity and emotional pain of early recovery by deliberately cultivating “an attitude of gratitude” through exercises such as making daily lists of the things for which they are grateful. Such practices counteract the tendency of the brain to focus on problems, pains and deficiencies by concentrating on the background abundance that is almost always there, if we’ll only look.

Western psychology has historically dismissed practices like these as superficial, even naïve. But that’s been changing recently. A new movement in the field, called Positive Psychology, focuses on health and well-being rather than on pathology, and it is producing solid research which lends support to the idea that consciously inclining the mind toward positive emotions does in fact do much to strengthen them.

Two researchers in this new movement, Dr. Michael McCollough, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Dr. Robert Emmons, of the University of California at Davis, are currently involved in a research project on “gratitude and thankfulness” to develop simple procedures for developing gratitude in daily life and assessing their effect on well-being. Their studies suggest that a daily, long-term commitment to focusing attention on the aspects of their lives for which they are grateful result in measurable and substantial improvements in people’s well-being.

In one experimental comparison, for instance, those who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events. A related benefit was observed in personal goal attainment. Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects who didn’t keep the lists.

Subjects who focused on gratitude received many other benefits as well. They experienced decreased stress in their lives. They reported increased levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness, vitality and life satisfaction, and lower levels of depression and stress. Perhaps most importantly, those who felt grateful were more likely to help others and to feel loved themselves. It seems that gratitude encouraged a positive cycle of reciprocal kindness among people, because one act based on gratitude encouraged another.

What I think all of this clearly means is that gratitude is, to some degree, a deliberate choice we make, a conscious stance toward life. It also means that it is a skill that can be taught and learned, practiced and strengthened. And what I find amazing is that we can derive all these robust benefits from a relatively small investment of time and energy. “Gratitude practice” can be as simple as recognizing and acknowledging how much support and help we receive from others. It can mean writing a gratitude letter to someone we appreciate, or making a daily list of five things for which we’re thankful.

In my experience with gay and lesbian clients, one resistance to doing these practices is that it reminds some too much of religion, to which many of us are understandably allergic. It’s important to emphasize that this work can be done as an entirely secular, psychological practice, whose purpose is to increase subjective well-being, and that it isn’t about piety or “being good.” It’s also important that gratitude practice never be done as a strategy for denying or belittling the real suffering in our lives. If we do it from a “stop feeling sorry for yourself” attitude, it only engenders inner resistance and resentment.

For those who’d like to explore the work of McCullough and Emmons further, Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons offers an excellent summary of the research. It discusses some of the hard questions, such as how to be grateful in the face of life’s misfortunes, and whether gratitude practice leads to complacency. It also offers 10 practical methods for cultivating the capacity for gratitude.

Tom Moon is a psychotherapist in San Francisco. His website is www.tommoon.net.